Great Lakes Observing & Forecasting Systems

Overview and Objectives

This project draws on various GLERL modeling and data resources that have not previously been used in combination. It expands on recent work in the NOAA-GLERL Integrated Physical and Ecological Modeling and Forecasting (IPEMF) Branch on quantifying heat storage in the Great Lakes and connecting this to over-lake evaporation and the general water budget of the lakes. It capitalizes on modeled (e.g., North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR), High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR), etc.) and observed meteorological datasets, and especially on the more recent advent of eddy covariance-based observations of evaporative and sensible heat fluxes from the Great Lakes Evaporation Network (GLEN). These datasets are used to drive hindcast simulations from the suite of models that exist within the IPEMF Branch. The objective of this project is to use these models to augment the observational dataset with more spatial richness in the information about lake surface heat and moisture fluxes, lake thermal structure, lake effect precipitation, and coastal processes.